# The Soap Opera as Play Structure
tags: #articles/soap-opera
One of the great things about having a very widespread social media presence is that once in a while the really interesting and good things that people say online actually percolate across your line of sight pre-curated so that you know there's a better chance than usual it's good stuff.
[Miguel Ribeiro at Red Room](https://x.com/moordereht) is a pretty solid dude and while we might disagree about the value of OSR, the man has a solid grasp of what makes for good gaming at the table. When he posted this to Twitter, I knew it was something I needed to take up because it shadowed something that has been kicking around in my head for a very long time.
And what he links to is this:
## Digging the Sandbox
Now part of the reason that I find this interesting is because it reflects how I've been running and playing games for a very, very long time.
I don't think I've ever referred to my mechanisms as "playing in a sandbox," because that has entirely different implications when you're talking about the wargaming side of the world. There is literal sandbox play in which you put your elements, your miniatures, your tanks, your men in a physical sandbox, which is easy to make into hills and valleys because it's made out of sand. And then you commence play.
That is what "sandbox play" is *intended* to reference in the context of traditional TTRPG discussion, but it has almost nothing to do with it.
Even if you allow for the fact of linguistic drift in order to make that fit together, you have to essentially give far more credit than is well-earned. But soap operas!
## Working the Soap
Those are considered lowbrow entertainment among the literati of the RPG elite. Right? Surely, soap operas have nothing to do with tabletop RPG play and never have, because isn't that all a bit base?
### Dallas
![[Dallas (cover).jpg]]
Have you met my friend **[Dallas](https://www.spigames.net/PDFv2/Dallas.pdf)**?^[Yes, that links to an actual place where you can download the text of the entire RPG. I was surprised to see it myself. It turns out that the license holder is hosting it on their own website. It must be okay.] For those of you too young to know, **[Dallas](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dallas_(1978_TV_series))** was perhaps the biggest television event for over a decade.
A soap opera of the epic scope and scale, the travails and emotional damage of an extremely rich family who could get up to all sorts of horrific shenanigans whether it be attempted murder, double dealing, multiple cases of sexual impropriety, more adultery than you could shake a stick at, and some of the shadiest business dealings known to man.
People tuned in every week to delve into the joy that was **Dallas**. The TTRPG was released in 1980. Let that sink in for a minute.
1980 in the RPG field is not really associated with things like story gaming or narrative leading the way or soap opera. And yet it was in 1980[^gb] where you have an RPG specifically based on the tenets of understanding and playing soap operas hitting the table.
I'm not going to say that it was a barn burner when it comes to making sales, in part because it is a creature of its time mechanically, but it's certainly a manifestation of something that is unexpected when observed from the present day.
It wants to simulate something which is not physically grounded. It wants to simulate storytelling. And that, my friends, is a core precept of soap opera play.
### Fiasco
![[Fiasco (cover).png|400]]
When you talk about games which explicitly lean on narrative to generate their mechanics, and which take on the load of soap opera plotting, that is, setting up relationships and turning up the intensity to 11 before setting them all loose to ram into each other over and over again, I can't really think of a better example that was critically well-received than **[[Fiasco]]**.
Again, if you've never played **Fiasco**, essentially it's all about sitting down at the table and putting together a group of characters who have deliberate and explicit relationships with one another, both convivial and antithetical, cooperative and oppositional.
Then, it's about specifically tuning the mechanics such that all of the interactions that happen at the table are about how those relationships either change or are reinforced.
If you like Coen Brothers movies, then the way that **Fiasco** plays out is going to make you laugh, smile, possibly dance in the aisles, and truly enjoy yourself. It is a wonder.
But it's also heavily beholden to the idea of soap opera plotting, in which character motivation does almost all of the heavy lifting.
The other part of the functionality of this type of gaming is borne by putting these characters who have heavy charges in relation to one another, in a situation which forces them to interact.
There is no way for them to escape. The pressure cooker is right there.
### Blades in the Dark
![[Blades in the Dark (cover).jpg|400]]
I know what you're thinking, "Lex, **[[Blades in the Dark]]** is not a soap opera game. It has nothing to do with being a soap opera. Nothing about it has anything soap opera at all on the table!" And that is where you're wrong.
While **Blades** is certainly not the *first* game to integrate these kinds of mechanics, it is a really fine example of a modern game in which the relationship between characters, not just player characters, but characters which are not immediately attached to a player are part of the creation space of the game, right from the beginning.
You are instructed to come up with people who are important to you. And why they are important to you. Likewise, the rest of the group. The other player characters are hard bound by a relationship to you through, in the case of **Blades in the Dark**, your criminal organization, which itself is treated as a character within the space of the mechanics.
It is no surprise or shouldn't be that **Blades** is often cited as a low-prep game. It is. It requires very little preparation to come to the table and be ready to throw down within the context of the situation your players have found themselves in due to their own personal motivations, the things that the organization as a whole require at a time, and the fact that there are multiple ties to multiple factions and individuals within and without those factions.
Every time you sit down at the table, somebody will knock over a domino because knocking over dominoes is fun. Everything else proceeds from that. This is a key element of understanding what soap opera style gameplay is really contingent upon.
### MSG(tm)
![[MSGtm (cover).jpg]]
It's quite possible that you have never heard of **[[MSG™]]** in your life. It's a few steps beyond obscure.
At first glance, you might just think that it is about an over-the-top cyberpunk future, which somehow managed to predict the world of influencers and corporate gig economies that someone put their thumb on fast forward and forgot to take it off ever. That's true. That's it, absolutely. Without question, completely true.
It also has a mechanic literally called *"Bring the Soap"* which is specifically about nasty little details between characters, both player characters and other characters in the setting.
And when I say nasty little details, I mean literal soap opera material. Your mom banged his dad and you both have a half-sister who may be inbred. But she works for the same corporation and is placed higher than you, so you resent it, and you're always looking for an opportunity to take her down a peg.
That kind of nasty little soap opera detail. It's amazing. The fact that it has a mechanical impact, that it influences the outcome of conflicts on the table, is critical to thinking about what soap opera play can mean and does mean.
Your personal and emotional needs and desires are critical to driving the experience at the table forward. You can't be without needs and wants, or nothing happens.
### Pasion de las Pasiones
![[Pasion de las Pasiones (cover).jpg]]
Let's go explicitly into the area of soap opera, and perhaps the most over-the-top and intense version of the soap opera, the [telenovela](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telenovela).
**[[Pasion de las Pasiones|Pasión de las Pasiones]]** (PDLP) is very specifically a game about playing out a soap opera, one with incredibly intense characters in an incredibly intense pressure pot of a situation who make their own trouble.
Inter-character antagonism is expected to be the order of the day. Petty hatreds, petty loves, grandiose gestures, over-the-top speechifying, **PDLP** has it all.
And it's all within the framework of a *[[Powered by the Apocalypse]]* game. If you were curious about how to play a game within the context of soap opera plotting, then **PDLP** would be the perfect example because there's no way for you to confuse the nature of the situation with anything else.
There's no way for you to imagine that it's any other way than it is. It is the rawest example or the most refined, depending on your point of view, of both the requirements of and the potentials of soap opera play.
I get it. You might still consider the telenovela, the soap opera, beneath your consideration. But if you're interested in telling a story, particularly an ongoing story, which largely assembles itself and always throws itself into new configurations you weren't necessarily ready for, this might be something worth taking a look at. I would certainly suggest that you do.
## Tools of the Trade
Soap opera style play is obviously not new. The sudden uptick in discussion using the terminology seems to be as much driven by people trying to express an old idea that's been around in multiple games for a very long time in a new way, pretending that it is something new and unusual and without real precedent in order to seem like people on the cutting edge of the game experience and not simply following in fairly well-worn tracks.
I get it. I understand it. I just don't respect it.
If you're going to engage with a process which has history, it seems like a short-changing that history, not to talk about it as part of helping people engage with it. But here we are.
Let's talk about some of the conceptual tools you can bring to bear if you want to bring some soap opera play to your table. It doesn't matter what kind of table you're running. It honestly does not. These techniques work just as well if you're running a straight-up [Kriegsspiel](https://kriegsspiel.org/what-is-kriegsspiel/) war game as an intimate little piece with a handful of characters trapped on a space station, trying to figure out what to do. You'll see the possibilities.
### The Three Core Questions
I end up talking about this a lot in terms of writing advice in general but it is absolutely and completely just as applicable when you're talking about RPGs.
In fact, if you will ever take the authorial stance in the course of play, then you can't ignore these three questions which will make all the difference when it comes to putting life on the tabletop.
- *What does the character want?*
- *Why can't the character have that?*
- *What are they going to do about it?*
That's it. Start with that.
The most important question you can ever ask about any character involved in a piece of writing, a TV show, or on your tabletop is, *"What do they want?"*
If they don't want anything, then there's no reason for them to be a part of the story. If they don't want anything, there's nothing that will motivate them into action.
Action is the whole point that we're hanging out with them. If they don't want anything, they are unaffected by anybody else's action.
So many characters die on the table simply because what they want is never really defined, and worse, never really communicated.
Once you know what they want, we can start talking about why they can't have it. Why do we need to talk about why they can't have it?
If they could have it, there would be no reason for a story. They would have no motivation to action. There would be no drive to change the situation.
Everything which is interesting is a system in dynamic change. If you are staring intently at a system which is not currently undergoing dynamic change, you are trying to figure out how things are going to fly apart once it's under pressure. Make use of that knowledge.
Lastly, figure out what the character is going to do about the fact that they can't have what they want.
What is their next action? This doesn't have to be a *good* choice. In fact, it's often better if it's *not* a good choice. Sometimes the character doesn't have enough information to make a good choice, which means their next choice should be to find out more information or to go off half-cocked.
They are motivated to find this information. Why are they motivated to find this information? Because they don't like the situation that they're in and they want to change it.
Once you have figured out the answer to your three core questions, you can ask *more* questions, which can be very helpful. How does the character feel about not being able to get what they want? Are they frustrated? Are they angry? Are they sad? Do they feel disheartened? That can color your choice of what the next action is or what they imagine it to be.
There may be multiple things that they want. And in fact, there probably should be. How do they feel about each of those things? What are they motivated to do? How are they going to solve their problem? How are they going to make their problem worse? Start from the three core questions. At the very minimum, if you can answer them, the plot will largely drive itself as the dominoes will fall. People will act. Once actions happen, characters will react. And so on.
### Not All Characters are Human
You've probably already figured this out, but you may not have taken it to the logical conclusion.
In many games, factions are treated like characters, which themselves have statistics or mechanical descriptions. That's one of the great things in modern game design.
It lets us start putting the three core questions onto bits of the setting outside of just the player characters. This is critical.
These are important questions for understanding how the world works. It allows the players to begin to understand the likely outcomes both of their actions and their choice of inaction.
Sometimes they have to choose between actions. What's likely to happen? If they don't know what's likely to happen, there's no real way to make a choice. It's either random or it doesn't matter; neither position makes for good storytelling or a rewarding experience.
How does thinking about the three core questions apply in the context of TTRPGs and characters which are not human? I'm not talking about orcs or goblins or alien species. I'm literally talking about things which are not typically thought of as characters.
Let's start with the easy kind. Factions. It's easy to imagine that a faction has wants and needs, which can be stymied, and that they may choose to take action as a collective entity in order to respond to the acquisition of whatever it is that they want.
If you have a faction in your setting and you know that you do, sit down and work out the three core question answers for that faction. Then don't keep it to yourself.
I know, I know, it is very tempting to keep all of that information behind the wall so that the players have to work in ignorance and can only find out a little bit at a time. But that involves a failure of understanding of the structure of games.
Player knowledge and character knowledge are inherently different. And when players have more knowledge, their characters can engage in more interesting choices. Choices which are ironically *uninformed* about what the player knows, because the player has answered the three core questions.
They know what the character wants and why they may act in a way counter to what the player knows. Let that happen.
#### The Thieves' Guild
Let's put together a bit of an example for a faction:
| | Question | Answer |
| ---------------------- | ------------------------------------- | --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| **The Thieves' Guild** | *What do they want?* | To keep the thieves of Greatminster under control so that the King's Guard don't come hunting them with a massive crack-down while simultaneously stealing as much as they can. |
| | *Why can't they have it?* | Because the Players' little crime syndicate won't stay on-leash and keeps bringing stupidly high heat down on the whole Guild, which means the Guard is sniffing around places that are inconvenient and everyone's making less profit. |
| | *What are they going to do about it?* | Try to get the PCs back in line, starting with a little roughing up, but maybe escalating to selling them out to the Guard as a sacrifice deal. |
There you go, a very straightforward three core question set of answers for a classic Thieves Guild in a fantasy setting. Given just that, you can probably figure out what the guild is likely to do at any given point. But not only that, what the player characters can do in order to change their situation as regards the Thieves' Guild.
Maybe they really do want to make apologies and help clean up the mess that they created. Maybe they want to overthrow the guild altogether and replace it with their own out-of-control bunch of shenanigans. Maybe they are actually a secret organization funded by the Guard to deliberately incite problems in the guild to give the Guard the excuse to crack down. This is just a big bowl of opportunities waiting to be kicked off.
But this is almost playing on easy mode when it comes to characters not being people. There is a particular narrative example that comes up in writing circles a lot, and it's probably worth going through the same exercise.
#### The USS Enterprise
| | Question | Answer |
| ---------------------- | ------------------------------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ |
| **The USS Enterprise** | *What do they want?* | To explore the depths of unexplored space and protect the crew of the ship, come Hell or high water. |
| | *Why can't they have it?* | The universe is dangerous and the crewmembers are putting themselves in dangerous situations constantly. |
| | *What are they going to do about it?* | Always be their place of safe haven when you can. Hold up to unimaginable damage in defense of your people. Bring powerful technology to bear when necessary. Sacrifice yourself for the greater good in extremis. |
The Enterprise truly is a character in the context of Star Trek. It clearly has wants and needs and things that it wants to accomplish, reasons why those things can't happen.
When it becomes important for those things to be expressed in terms of how it feels about them, stories do hinge around those issues.
Again, once you know what a character wants, why they can't have it, and what they are going to do about it, even if that character is not a human being, or isn't even technically related to human beings, but has a desire in the context of the narrative, you can predict how it's going to behave and what it's going to go seek out.
The Enterprise wants to explore. What kind of stories is it going to appear in? Quests of exploration. It wants to protect its crew more than it's concerned for its own continued existence. That means it's going to take massive amounts of damage and come limping out if it is at all possible. If it's not, the crew comes first.
#### Time
Let's try one more example. It may be one that you have never considered.
| | Question | Answer |
| -------- | ------------------------------------- | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| **Time** | *What do they want?* | To push things forward, in particular the war on the horizon. To end things. To erode things that are established. |
| | *Why can't they have it?* | The Kingdom of Aelmore wants peace with the invaders and keeps trying to divert the war. People keep building things, organizations, nations, monuments. |
| | *What are they going to do about it?* | Continuously apply pressure, unendingly. Be patient but never let up. Know that in the end, entropy always wins. |
This is intentionally a reference to a Scene direction in **[[Microscope]]** where it is suggested that time itself may be a character worth bringing in for someone to play in a situation where time and the passage thereof is critical to maintaining the pressure on the situation.
That's one of the best pieces of advice that I've ever read in an RPG, and it's always stuck with me. Think about personifying, but not reifying, time as a character within the context of your game.
What does time want? In this case, time wants to erode things. It wants endings. It wants entropy. It wants maximum disorder and the erosion of existing order.
But it can't have that because people keep building things. They keep trying. They keep pushing. They keep raising things up.
So what is it going to do about it? It's always there. There will always be pressure. There will never be a question or hesitation in the mind of time, as it were, that in the end, it will win.
This is a very dark setting take, but appropriate to a lot of situations. What if we subvert it? What if time (or fate) wants to see evermore growth. It wants to see more nations and more organizations and more complexity of life.
What if time is pushing forward, inexorably, in places and times which characters don't want to be moved out of? Maybe the characters want stability and time is inherently destabilizing because static things don't grow.
At that point, do you have an interesting setting? I would say that you do, yes. Characters can react to one another in that context. You can specify and understand what they want that is incompatible, at least at first glance, with what another character wants.
The three core questions get you there.
### Relationship Mapping
Some games integrate putting together a relationship map from the beginning. That's really a good idea.
It's not necessarily great for everybody or for everything but having things spread out in front of you in a way which is clear at a glance that it makes what needs to be touched narratively and conceptually immediately clear.
From my perspective, the real secret is realizing that you can label the connections between elements in ways which define almost a second language for you to immediately see the possibilities.
Let me put in an example:
``` mermaid
graph TD
FirstSquad[First Squad] -.->|"thinks losers & reprobates"| ThirdSquad
SecondSquad[Second Squad] -.->|"thinks stuck-up elitists"| FirstSquad
ThirdSquad[Third Squad]
Abel((Abel)) -->|"likes"| Charlie((Charlie))
Charlie((Charlie)) -->|"likes"| Abel((Abel))
Baker((Baker)) -.->|"adversarial"| Charlie((Charlie))
Abel -. "member of" .-> ThirdSquad
Baker -. "member of" .-> ThirdSquad
Charlie -. "member of" .-> ThirdSquad
```
(One of the great things about using **[Obsidian](https://obsidian.md)** as my editor is that you can simply generate Mermaid graphs with a pretty straightforward language.
But Mermaid is such a simple language that you can go to your choice of LLM Chatbot and simply describe the situation that you want it to create a graph for. Modern technology is amazing.)
Here we have three characters: Abel, Baker, and Charlie. They are all members of Third Squad.
Charlie likes Abel and Abel likes Charlie, but Baker has an adversarial relationship with Charlie.
First Squad thinks that Third Squad is made up of losers and reprobates, while Second Squad thinks First Squad is made up of stuck-up elitists.
Just looking at this, you can imagine what kind of tensions can come up, who is likely to get into a conflict with whom, why, and how.
Putting together things like this can really give you a huge advantage when you're thinking about what happens next. For every player at the table, the biggest, most important question is *"what happens next?"*
### Not Everybody Plays Nice
The last tool I want to put on the table for you is something you've probably picked up from the discussion we've been having so far in almost every example, in almost every game I've brought up, there is inter-character conflict.
It's not just between player characters and NPCs. It's grounded, based, structured right into the fabric of the games and the advice that I've put in front of you.
This is terrifying for a lot of people. So much advice for tabletop RPGs over the last 50 years has gone straight to "there should never be conflict between players at your table and if there is, you've done something wrong, period."
There is a certain level of truth to that statement, but only insofar as it refers to conflict between *players* at a personal level. That makes the game less fun for everybody and nobody wants that.
Conflict between the *characters of players*? That's amazing. That brings a little bit of fire all the time. No, I'm not talking about PvP. I'm talking about characters who want different things, or even the same thing and can't have it for different reasons. They make different choices based on that fact. It's critical to having self-motivating players in a real sense.
Give them reasons to push against each other in a reasonable way and things always become more interesting. If I had to put my finger directly on the one thing that is pivotal to soap opera style play, it would be allowing the player characters to have conflict between one another, even encourage it and cultivate it in certain ways.
Give them the mechanism to disagree so that it makes a difference when they do agree or when they do cooperate. They need that freedom. They need that openness.
It doesn't matter if you're in a spaceship running cargo to try and pay off what you owe to the mob, or if you're diving dungeons, trying to get rich so that you can pay off a resurrection spell for your dead wife.
Let the characters butt heads. Let them have opposed intents while they have reasons to cooperate. At that point, the game just runs itself when you put in oppositional intents from characters beyond the players.
Sit back, steeple your fingers, and have a good time. Or if you're playing the better games in this list, lean forward, steeple your fingers, smile dangerously, and have a good time because you too are a player at the table, playing with everyone else, making the story alongside everyone else, and having a great time. As all of you push the story forward with your own agendas and your own needs, your own wants and your own goals.
## Cleaning it Up
We've talked about sandbox and soap opera play as stylistic structures, which have certain elements that make them possible.
I've run down some RPGs which have very strong soap opera influences, both structurally and mechanically, all of which I think you should check out. If you haven't been aware of these games, use them like a checklist. You will not be disappointed.
I've run down some of the tools of the trade, and it's probably worth setting them out once more very quickly.
If you want to play your games in a soap opera mode, keep these things in mind:
- **The three core questions**.
- *What does the character want?*
- *Why can't they have it?*
- *What are they going to do about that?*
- **Not all characters are human**; use the descriptive power of the three core questions to explain what non-human elements of your story want and why they can't have it.
- **Use relationship mapping** to explore the connections between elements and how they can affect each other or how they might want to affect each other.
- **Not everybody plays nice**. Make room for conflict at the table.
Even if you just keep these things in mind, no matter what RPG you're playing, no matter what affordances and facilities and mechanics that it provides for you to interact with, just making use of these tools can give you the edge when it comes to soap opera play.
Let the characters tell the story. Don't impose the story on them. Let the story arise naturally from their interactions, their wants, their needs, and their failures to achieve those things. Sometimes even their successes.
Go out and play some games
[^gb]: For comparison, **[[Ghostbusters]]** from WEG is widely considered to be one of the earliest narrative-focused (if not narrative-first) RPGs that saw widespread traction. That was 1986.